I shrank away from her as cold panic washed over me like a slap of icy water. With horror, I understood that she was more powerful than I was and that she was evil. Why hadn’t I seen it before? She had put up a spell so that no one could hear us, and now she was going to kill me and take my magick.

Erin—or whatever the thing before me truly was—sent out slim wisps of gray smoke. The dark vapor grew thicker and began to fill the room. I felt myself choking.

The creature took a step toward me, and I stumbled away from it. It opened its horrible jaws. “Fight,” it said in a voice that was more animal than human. “Fight me.”

I racked my brain for a blocking spell, but I couldn’t think clearly. My body was pulsing with adrenaline. Did Alyce know that Erin was evil? Did Hunter know? What would happen to them once I was gone and this thing had my magick? I had survived so much in the last few months. Was this really how I would be done in?

The creature leaned toward me as the darkness closed in. I didn’t know what to do. Blindly I threw out my hands and sent a white ball of energy at the creature. It was fearsome-looking, brilliant and powerful. I had never called up something like that before, and for a moment I felt a surge of hope. But the creature merely made a flicking gesture with its left arm and easily deflected the ball across the room. It slammed against a metal shelving unit with an enormous crash. Back stock of notebooks flew off the top shelf and rained all over the floor. I could hardly see anything through the black vapor. I cowered against the wall behind me and finally sank to the floor.

The creature reached out a claw and grabbed my shoulder. “Morgan,” said a voice through the darkness. It was a lovely, musical voice, and for a moment I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it before. “Morgan,” it repeated, “are you all right?”

I looked down at the horrifying claw on my shoulder. Slowly it began to shift and change. The thick, muddy gray skin began to lighten, and the cruel claws receded until it was nothing but a small, pale hand almost the size of a child’s. I looked up into Erin’s clear green gaze. “Are you all right?” she repeated.

The fog around me began to lift, and I sat up. “What happened? ”

“Take a deep breath,” Erin advised. “Now release it. Do it again,” she urged. “Focus on the breath. Now ground yourself.”

Leaning forward, I placed my forehead against the cool tile floor. Slowly my head cleared. “You need to learn to control your emotions,” Erin said. “Pride and fear can cut you off from your power and leave you vulnerable. I’m sorry,” she added as I sat up. “You fooled me with the divagnth. I didn’t realize you weren’t ready for that lesson.”

Standing up, Erin reached out her hand and pulled me to my feet. “You’re strong, Morgan,” she said. “That’s your weakness.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“You have strong native power,” Erin explained. “Strong abilities. You just called up white witch fire, no easy task. But you don’t have control.” She gestured toward the scorched metal shelves and the Books of Shadows that had spilled all over the floor. “That makes you dangerous.”

“But you’re here to teach me control,” I protested.

“Morgan,” she said with forced patience, “I understand that you’ve been in a complicated situation. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that you’ve been forced into a situation in which you’ve had to begin your education in the middle of things, instead of at the proper beginning.”

“What are you saying?” I asked warily.

“I’m saying that you should back up.” Erin’s voice was brittle. “Take a break from magick that is too advanced for you and focus instead on learning your plants and witch history. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but when you’re sailing in the wrong direction, sometimes it’s faster to go back than it is to keep pushing on until you’ve gone around the world.”

“I feel like you’re punishing me,” I said bitterly.

“It’s for your own safety.” Erin’s voice was like a door slamming shut, and I knew that there was no use arguing. “And it’s not forever, Morgan,” she added. “We’ll begin again tomorrow, at the library. At three-thirty sharp.”

The bell over the door jingled again—the customers leaving—and Alyce poked her head through the curtain. “Is everything okay back here?” she asked. Her eyes fell on the ruined mass of notebooks. “Oh, my.”

“We were just about to clean that up,” I said quickly. Erin and I walked over to the pile of Books of Shadows and began brushing them off and placing them back on the shelf. Thankfully, most of them were undamaged. Erin told Alyce that she would pay for the ones that were.

“It’s my fault,” Erin told her, digging in her bag. “Besides, the cost of a few blank Books of Shadows isn’t one-tenth of the value of this book.” She jerked her head in the direction of On the Containement of Magick.

I watched Erin hug Alyce as we said good-bye. Erin was stiff, but her affection seemed real as she tucked the silk-wrapped book under her arm. Then again, she’d seemed pretty real when she’d looked like a hideous monster only half an hour before.

I sensed who was calling a second before the phone rang. “I’ll get it,” I called, starting up from the dining room table, where I was doing my homework. But it was already too late.

“Hello?” my mom’s voice said from the kitchen. Dad was working late, so she and I were the only ones home. We’d finished dinner about two hours ago, and Mom had been working on her various documents in the kitchen since then.

“Yes, this is she,” I heard her say. “Oh, hello. Yes. What? Well—no, she didn’t. I see. Mmm-hmm.” Even through the door, I could hear the edge of anger dawning in my mom’s voice.

I stared down at the books and notebooks spread out before me and tried to focus on the analysis of vectors I was doing for physics, but it was no use.

“Was that out of a hundred points?” I heard my mother ask, and I bit my lip.

After a moment I heard Mom hang up, and the door between the dining room and the kitchen swung open. “Morgan, we need to talk.” Her voice was grim.

My stomach churned. I put down my pencil. “Okay.”

Sitting down across from me, my mom said, “I just got a phone call from your history teacher, Mr. Powell.”

I didn’t even bother trying to act surprised. “I know,” I said.

“He’s concerned about your grade in his class. So am I.”

“I know,” I said again. Shifting in my seat, I added, “I’ve already talked to him about doing some extra credit—”

Holding up her hand traffic-cop style, my mom cut me off. “Morgan, I’m not happy about the fact that you failed two tests. But I’m even more unhappy about the fact that you hid it from Dad and me. When were you going to tell us?”

“I thought that if I brought my grade up—”

“But what if you didn’t?” my mom interrupted. “Mr. Powell says that these two exams count for fifty percent of your final grade. Were you going to wait until you failed the class to let us know that there was a problem?” She ran her fingers through her russet hair in an I-don’t-know-what-to-do — with-you gesture.

“With extra credit, I could still get a B in the class!”

“You could still get an F!” my mom snapped. “Have you even started this extra-credit work?”

I dug through my stack of papers and pulled out the notes I’d already made for my history paper. I didn’t realize until after I’d handed them to my mom that I was making a horrible mistake.

“This can’t be your history paper.” Mom’s voice was tense. “What is this?”

“We’re allowed to write on any subject,” I explained weakly.

She simply looked at me for a moment, then slapped the notes down on the table in frustration. “Why do you have to test us? You know how Dad and I feel about witchcraft nonsense!”